


dii2count mattre22e2, crazy 2ale twoday only!!!

by coldhope



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Humanstuck, Oneshot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-10
Updated: 2012-08-11
Packaged: 2017-11-11 20:23:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/482568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldhope/pseuds/coldhope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That. Has got to be. The worst fucking job in the known universe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

That. Has got to be. The worst fucking job in the known universe.

You mean at least people who do things like sort out septic tanks get paid a decent wage and after like seventy Silkwood-style showers probably even get to have interpersonal relationships. The fucker who twirls the signs on the little anemic grassy median by the entry to the strip mall? That guy is not racking up pension benefits.

You drive past him twice a day. That means he's there the whole fucking eight hours you spend at this hilarious wreck of a computer store.

Sometimes out the windows of the store you see someone come up to him, give him something. You hope it's a big fucking thing of iced Gatorade because it is ninety-nine point five out there at ten AM and he is never not moving. 

You wonder: is he really that much of a fuckup that this is the only job he can fucking land?

After two weeks you pull off in the goddamn strip mall entry and put on your blinkers. The guy behind you honks and gestures, but drives round; the kid in the shades waving the **60 % Markdown All Mattresses** sign glances over, stops twirling said sign, and approaches. 

Fuck, he's pretty. You weren't expecting that. He's....really pretty. From a distance you'd only been able to tell he was slender and blond and wore gigantic fucking sunglasses, for the which you do not blame him, it is bright as fuck out here. But god, he has very good lips, flushed with heat, and the bits of his face you can see make you want to see more.

"Help you?" he says. There's Texas in there.

"Yeah," you say. "What's your name?"

He lets go of your window and backs away. Behind you, some asshole honks, and another asshole, spurred on by the first, and you think: fuck, never mind, and drive on.

~

Three days later it is a particularly foul fucking afternoon. You've been dicking around with the innards of a computer that honestly by all rights should be taken out back and shot, but its owner steadfastly refuses to countenance buying a new one, so you're stuck every month or two trying to make old hardware less inefficient. You've already installed as much extra memory as this fucker can handle and your client refuses to do anything like, oh, you don't know, UPGRADE, so you're stuck with what you can do for heatsinks. Your iPad warbles to let you know there's a game starting in half an hour: right, fuck, you have to take the other way back into town, escape the herd of asshole sports fans cluttering up the freeway. 

You pick it up and stare. Shit, it's still 107 outside?

Looking over the top of the iPad you can see through the store's gross windows to the little grassy median in the entryway where that blond kid stands waving his sign. He's there. He...fuck, even as you watch he's sort of leaning back against the broiling steel of the main strip-mall sign.

You may have to spend your days doing stupid shit you hate but that does not make you an unperson, and you go back to the little fridge where you stick your Monster and Gatorade and you hook out a bottle of lime-flavored Gatorade Rain and you put up the I WILL BE BACK PLEASE BE PATIENT sign and you push open the door and the bell goes dingle and the heat fucking hits you like a plastic bag to the face. Fuck, this state is not meant to be lived in by human beings for like eight months out of the twelve.

By the time you make it from your shop to the little median strip where the dude is still twirling his sign, exhaustedly, your shirt prickles with sweat over the shoulders and a little awkward drop is working its way down your spine. When you get close enough you can see he's sunburnt, shit, that pale hair must mean he's got some kind of pigment fuckup thing, shit, that'd explain the sunglasses even on cloudy days, and they have him doing _this?_

"Hey," you say, holding out the cold bottle of Gatorade. Fat drops of moisture have already condensed on its surface. "You look like you could use this."

He jerks and twists to stare at you, and you can't tell what his eyes are doing. 

"Seriously, dude. It's hot as fuck and you are standing right in the sun, okay, just...just fucking take it."

He stares a moment longer and then reaches for the bottle, rolls its coolness across his forehead, and wrenches it open. Most of it's gone in two or three vast swallows and he pauses, gasping, and burps enormously, then goes back to drinking.

Fuck.

"...thanks," he says, panting, the bottle empty in his hand. "Fuck. Uh. Thanks."

"I'm Sollux," you say, idiotically.

"Dave Strider." He sways a little, catches himself against the broiling-hot sign, hisses.

"Do they really make you stand out here all day?"

"Yuh." He blinks down at the bottle, then at you: you reach out to take it back, and he picks up his sign again. "Minimum wage, but hey."

"Can you take breaks? I'm, like. Pretty sure that's illegal if you can't."

"Oh, fuck, we're all beyond legal, you should know that," he says, and waves his sign. _MATTRESS DISCOUNT WAREHOUSE_ , it says. _CRAZY SALES!!!_

"Then fuck legal, and, like, come be in the air conditioning for a couple minutes, dude. Seriously. This is no weather for bullshit like discount mattresses."

Dave Strider waves his sign again, halfheartedly. "I can't. I'll get written up."

"You know anything about computers?"

"Yeah," he says guardedly.

"Like how to fix them when people do shit like randomly download stupid obvious viruses and/or can't work out how to install printer drivers?"

He groans. "There should be an eleventh commandment. Never tell your aunties you know computers."

"Word. But we could use another guy who _knows computers_. I work over there." You jerk a thumb over your shoulder. Big, pearly sweat drops are already beading at his temples: it's only midday, the heat is going to get a fuckton worse before he's done his shift. "Skaia Computing. It's shit work, cleaning the dust bunnies out of granny's tower, sucking viruses out of facebook duckface girls' laptops, but it's indoors and they pay min wage."

Just then a car pulls up beside the two of you and some douchetard cackles and tosses an empty Red Bull can: despite Strider's instinctive wince it bonks off his shoulder.

"Fuck," he says, so tired. "Take me to your leader."

"Best goddamn thing you've said today."


	2. Chapter 2

You are not good with heat.

This is not a new development. Back in Houston you had felt like you were living in a toaster half the fucking year, but you hadn't had to spend a lot of your life standing directly under the Earth's sun being flash-steamed by humidity while waving a cretin sign at people whose only response to your presence was to throw shit at you. 

You passed out once, but as you slumped over you fell against the steel edge of the strip-mall sign and the instant pain of the hot steel woke you back up again. That was a bad day. Your boss told you to bring more water next time, when you complained. 

You're getting paid under the table for a couple reasons, which means that a) you don't get taxed, although the amount of tax you'd owe on this fucking income is hilarious to countenance, and b) you don't get to do shit like, oh, you know, take breaks much. When you have to piss bad enough that you can't hold it any more you scuttle over to the KFC and shiver in the air-conditioning for as long as it takes you, and then it's back over to your sign and the endless flow of traffic and the winking, moving, heliographing point of the sun reflected from windshield and window and hood and trunk. 

It's _demoralizing_ , this heat. It feels like being locked in a sauna, that damp saturated thickness of the air that makes it a chore to draw into your lungs; it feels like being slowly suffocated, even as sweat stings your eyes behind your shades and trickles down your spine and glues your shirt to your body and pools in your navel. When your bro picks you up each afternoon he wrinkles his nose and you have just about quit caring, you just lie in the passenger seat of his shitbox powder-blue Altima and breathe the plastic-tasting air-conditioned air. You shower when you get home, as quick as you can, in cool water, and then you lie down for a while, and after an hour or two you feel a bit less shitty; then it's cheap microwave pizza and coke for dinner, and you get as much sleep as you can because tomorrow you have to do it all fucking again. 

There are reasons for all of this but they kind of suck, so you try not to think about them too much. 

One day a guy in a beat-up Civic pulls over in the entry lane and puts his blinkers on. You put your sign down and go over, maybe he wants to buy a discount mattress or some shit. He peers up at you with...hey, weird, eyes that are two different colors, brown and blue. It's a sort of searching look.

"Help you?" you inquire. 

"What's your name?"

Okay, yeah, you don't need to be creeped on by every weird-eyed perv in the fucking county, you back away from his car and go pick up your sign. Let's hope your boss didn't see that. 

A couple days later you forgot your fucking sunblock _you forgot your fucking sunblock_ and by midday your face is tight and aching, the backs of your calves and your forearms pink and hot to the touch--hotter than the rest of you. You're legitimately actually thinking of telling your boss where he can put his mattress discount signs and going to sit in the KFC and maybe die or something--shitty jobs are shitty jobs and this is just beyond what you are prepared to bear for the sake of minimum wage--and someone says "hey."

You turn, and stare, and, shit, it's Two Different Colored Eyes Guy. He's way taller than you thought--long legs, skinny as fuck, brown hair all over the place in the kind of mess you get when you trim your bangs yourself and then forget about it. He's holding out--oh, shit, he's holding out a bottle of Gatorade. 

"You look like you could use this."

You stare.

He says something about just fucking take it, and you can tell the cap's still factory sealed and you are going to fucking faint if you don't do something so you just reach out and take it, shocking-cold in your hand, roll that coldness over your burning face, and then wrench off the cap. It tastes like nothing at all, it tastes like green, and you gulp half the bottle down and pause to gasp and for a moment you think it'll come back up, a spike of pain transfixing your forehead, but you just let out a world-champion burp, everything settles, and you finish the bottle in another few vast swallows. 

Your brain feels like it's come loose from its moorings and is drifting, banging into the sides of your skull. Weird Eyes Guy is staring. 

"...thanks," you say, between heaving breaths. "Fuck. Uh. Thanks."

"I'm Sollux," he says. There's a bit of a lisp: _Tholluckth._

"Dave Strider." Because fuck everything. Fuck everything is why. Your stomach cramps, ice-cold Gatorade against your crab-steamed innards, and you hope you're not gonna ralph it all right back up over Weird-Eyed Sollux. You sway a little, catch yourself against the sign, hiss at the burn of baked steel against your hand.

"Do they really make you stand out here all day?" he asks. 

You look down at the bottle in your hand. "Yuh." After a moment he reaches out and you hand it back to him, not sure what else to do, and pick up your sign. "Minimum wage, but hey."

"Can you take breaks? I'm, like. Pretty sure that's illegal if you can't."

"Oh, fuck," you say, your brain fuzzier than ever, "we're all beyond legal, you should know that." You give your sign a twirl. 

He's still there. 

"Then fuck legal, and, like, come be in the air conditioning for a couple minutes, dude. Seriously. This is no weather for bullshit like discount mattresses."

He's _still_ there. "I can't. I'll get written up." You twirl your sign again. Wow, you feel weird as fuck, and this guy is just not going away. You wonder if he's gonna, like, kidnap you and take you away in his beat-up Civic or something. You wouldn't mind, if the Civic has AC.

"You know anything about computers?"

The question is so completely out of left field that it makes you blink and straighten up a little. "...Yeah." What the fuck is his angle?

"Like how to fix them when people do shit like randomly download stupid obvious viruses and/or can't work out how to install printer drivers?"

Despite yourself, you groan. "There should be an eleventh commandment. Never tell your aunties you know computers." How many times have you had to tell people they need to plug the goddamn mouse into the back of the computer before using it?

"Word. But we could use another guy who _knows computers_. I work over there." He jerks a thumb over his skinny shoulder at the little computer shop down the other end of the strip mall. "Skaia Computing. It's shit work, cleaning the dust bunnies out of granny's tower, sucking viruses out of facebook duckface girls' laptops, but it's indoors and they pay min wage."

You're about to say something when a mid-nineties Mustang slows beside you in the entry lane and some asswipe leans out and pegs a Red Bull can at you. You're enough off your game that you wince away too slow, and the can bonks off your shoulder, spraying your shirt with the dregs and backwash. The sun is cracking your skull and your face is on fire and your innards are cramping and you know what?

"Fuck," you say. "Take me to your leader."

"Best goddamn thing you've said today."


End file.
